Oil’s Dark Heart Pumps Strong

‘Private Empire,’ Steve Coll’s Book on Exxon Mobil

The cover of “Private Empire,” Steve Coll’s new book about the Exxon Mobil Corporation, is a forbidding black slab. Even the lettering looks dismal. It’s the color of a chain smoker’s lung.

Mr. Coll’s vast narrative is bookended by accounts of man-made disasters. “Private Empire” opens with the Exxon Valdez oil spill in Alaska in 1989 (the captain had been drinking), and closes with the BP Deepwater Horizon nightmare in the Gulf of Mexico in 2010. In between there is much for those who loathe Big Oil generally, and Exxon Mobil specifically, to feast upon.

The company, Mr. Coll writes, is “a corporate state within the American state” and “one of the most powerful businesses ever produced by American capitalism.” Some employees call its ominous headquarters near Dallas the Death Star.

Little light, or information, leaks from the Death Star. The company wields “a corporate system of secrecy, nondisclosure agreements and internal security,” Mr. Coll writes, “that matched some of the most compartmented black boxes of the world’s intelligence agencies.” Exxon Mobil’s media strategy, an in-house joke declares, is learning to say “no comment” in 50 different languages.

“Private Empire” details Exxon Mobil’s harassment of environmental scientists, its messy entanglements in small wars in far-flung countries, its withholding of information from Congress, its dissembling about global warming, its arrogant culture, its obscene stockpiles of cash.

The company is a near-perfect and ready-made villain. When Greenpeace activists climbed to the roof of the Death Star in 2003, its members unfurled a banner that declared the site a global-warming crime scene. Exxon Mobil is not easily pushed around. As President George W. Bush said to the prime minister of India in 2001, “Nobody tells those guys what to do.”

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Alessandra Montalto/The New York Times

Mr. Coll is a staff writer for The New Yorker, a two-time Pulitzer Prize winner and the author of books that include “The Bin Ladens” (2008) and “Ghost Wars” (2004). His new book, like his previous ones, is a big dig. Mountains of facts are mined, crushed and consumed as narrative fuel. If Mr. Coll were a corporation, you would want to impose a carbon tax on him.

“Private Empire” is meticulous, multi-angled and valuable. It is also, perhaps surprisingly, despite all the dark facts I have dumped above, impartial. Mr. Coll and his phlegmatic research assistants have interviewed more than 400 people, including Exxon Mobil’s longtime chief executive Lee R. Raymond, a legendarily hard character.

It’s among this book’s achievements that it attempts to view a dysfunctional energy world, as often as not, through Exxon Mobil’s eyes. The company is portrayed here, some egregious missteps aside, as possessing an honorable if rigid corporate culture that seeks to supply a product (unlike tobacco companies, to which it is often compared) that a functioning society actually must have.

That product takes great effort to acquire. “Unlike Walmart or Google,” Mr. Coll writes, “the object of Exxon’s business model lay buried beneath the earth,” often in unstable countries. The company learned, over time, that is was necessary to play Darwinian hardball to survive. “Compromise,” Mr. Coll writes, “was not the Exxon way.”

Mr. Coll’s dispassionate sentences are his book’s great strength and its subacoustic weakness. He covers an enormous amount of ground. There are intricate assessments of Exxon Mobil’s morally complicated operations in countries like Chad, Indonesia, Equatorial Guinea, Venezuela and Vladimir V. Putin’s Russia. At length Mr. Coll dilates on the “resource curse,” a phrase for the way that finding oil reserves can make some poor countries go backward instead of forward, like lottery winners on an unhinged binge.

There are accounts of employee kidnappings, and tick-tock financial reporting about events like Exxon’s 1999 merger with Mobil. Mr. Coll’s prose sweeps the earth like an Imax camera.

He is especially good on the company’s tangled relationship with George W. Bush’s administration. Mr. Raymond was a close friend of Dick Cheney’s. They’d both attended the University of Wisconsin and both loved to hunt. They saw the world in similar terms. Mr. Raymond telephoned his friend on corporate matters when necessary.

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Steve CollCredit
Lauren Shay Lavin

But Exxon Mobil, in many ways, kept its distance from the Bush presidency. “I’m not a U.S. company and I don’t make decisions based on what’s good for the U.S.,” Mr. Raymond once declared. The company steered clear of the folly in Iraq, despite the administration’s appeals to help that nation’s oil industry get back on its feet, until the smoke had well cleared, and Exxon Mobil employees would be safe there.

Mr. Bush mostly delivered on the oil industry’s agenda. Yet he seemed to want to distance himself from Exxon Mobil and Big Oil. He even declared in his 2006 State of the Union address that the United States was “addicted to oil.” He hoped to be remembered, Mr. Coll suggests, for the long-term investments his administration had made in alternative energy.

About Mr. Bush’s hope, the author is pitiless. “Like presidents of both parties before him, however,” Mr. Coll writes, “he lacked the depth of conviction, the political coalitions and the scientific vision to do more than toss relative pennies into a wishing fountain.”

That withering bit notwithstanding, “Private Empire” is perhaps too stoic for its own good. Emotionally it has few peaks or valleys. Little narrative momentum builds. Where do you draw the line between an important book and a consistently interesting one? In this book’s more than 600 pages you may sometimes be tempted to utter, as did BP’s hapless chief executive Tony Hayward, disastrously, during the Deepwater Horizon disaster, “I’d like my life back.”

Part of what keeps you reading is Mr. Coll’s sly and revealing portrait of Mr. Raymond, who became Exxon’s chief executive a few years after the Valdez spill and ran the company until 2006. He changed it in profound ways, moving its headquarters to Texas from Manhattan and making safety, efficiency and sheer profitability his hardboiled goals.

Mr. Raymond is riveting in his personal unattractiveness. He possesses a prominent harelip from a cleft palate, and “the jowls beneath his chin could billow like a bullfrog’s neck,” Mr. Coll writes. Mr. Raymond terrified his employees. His bluntness also inspired them. I’d read a biography of this man in a heartbeat. His standard drink on the company’s private jet? A glass of milk with popcorn in it.

With Mr. Raymond’s retirement, Exxon Mobil has become, if only slightly, a kinder and more gentle place. It has acknowledged global warming; it has advocated for a carbon tax. It is closely monitoring environmentally friendly alternative energies and, less popularly, has begun to get involved in risky drilling techniques like hydraulic fracturing, or fracking.

It’s a company that’s begun to care what we think of it. It seems to now want a good response to the following question, posed by a corporate-responsibility specialist to an Exxon Mobil executive, albeit in more graphic language than can be printed here:

What are you going to say to your grandkids when they say, Grandpa, why did you screw up the planet?

PRIVATE EMPIRE

Exxon Mobil and American Power

By Steve Coll

Illustrated. 685 pages. The Penguin Press. $36.

A version of this review appears in print on April 27, 2012, on page C25 of the New York edition with the headline: Oil’s Dark Heart Pumps Strong. Today's Paper|Subscribe